Roberta Blackman-Woods: The hon. Gentleman has described the situation that exists at the moment, not the position in which we will all be in after the Bill is enacted. The Bill puts in writing the agreement between the local authority and the developer. Significantly, as we have all been discussing, it gives powers to the Secretary of State to intervene in the process by producing regulations that will say something about the conditions that can be attached.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the system is working well at the moment because, as Councillor Newman reminded the Committee,
“nine out of 10 permissions are given, and 470,000 permissions are already granted for homes up and down the land that await development for various reasons.”
All those reasons are not pre-commencement planning conditions.
Hugh Ellis said:
“From our point of view, the concern about conditions is that they are fairly crucial in delivering quality outcomes.”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 23, Q31.]
He also said that he had no evidence whatever that conditions result in delay. Duncan Wilson from Historic England said that local authorities are usually reasonable already. He did not feel that unnecessary conditions were being imposed, and he believed that that particular assertion could be challenged. That is what we have been attempting to do thus far today.
It is not just Her Majesty’s Opposition saying that all this is unnecessary; it is the Town and Country Planning Association, the LGA, Historic England and the British Property Federation, which said that it saw an issue with the discharge of conditions, but could not give us much detail on pre-commencement conditions.
I want to outline the evidence we have been given on why the clause is unnecessary. Various people who gave evidence said that they felt that if an application was turned down because an agreement could not be reached with the developer, it could take longer to argue about the condition and determine it than under the current   set of arrangements. I point out to the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton that that point has been made not only by me but by lots of other people.
Amendment 22 seeks to remove subsection (5) from proposed section 100ZA. Local authorities could still make necessary pre-commencement conditions and still insist in certain circumstances, where they can reach an agreement with a developer, that those conditions stand. It would ensure that local authorities are not restricted from applying conditions that they think are necessary either by the Secretary of State or by not getting the written agreement and then the applicant going to appeal.
As we said earlier, it is quite difficult to envisage a set of circumstances in which the Secretary of State would step in and apply conditions, especially as the provisions of the framework that cover setting conditions are already heavily prescribed. Simply repeating them here for the Secretary of State to somehow come in and make a different decision under those same sets of restrictions and prescriptions seems a rather strange thing for the Government to do.
As I pointed out earlier, the NPPF has lots of paragraphs that deal with planning conditions, but I will not read them all out; we do not have time this afternoon. Some of the most pertinent to today’s discussions are paragraphs 203 to 206. Paragraph 203 is important because it makes the case that we have been making today about why we want local authorities to be able to have the same planning conditions. It states:
“Local planning authorities should consider whether otherwise unacceptable development could be made acceptable through the use of conditions or planning obligations. Planning obligations should only be used where it is not possible to address unacceptable impacts through a planning condition.”
I want to labour that point because the Minister’s national planning policy framework sets out for local authorities that conditions should be the primary vehicle that is used or put in place to try to make unacceptable developments acceptable. That is his direction to local authorities. He then comes along a few years down the line and says, “We might have given you that direction, but we now think you are overdoing it a bit”, which is presumably what the Government say, “so we are now going to take that power away from you. If you are using this power too much, we will have it limited by the Secretary of State.” However, that is not in paragraph 204, which states:
“Planning obligations should only be sought where they meet all of the following tests...necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms”—
that is in clause 7—and where they are
“directly related to the development; and fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind to the development.”
My point is that local authorities already have to ensure that their conditions follow the principles set out in clause 7 for the Secretary of State. So they should be doing all that anyway.
The NPPF states:
“Planning conditions should only be imposed where they are necessary, relevant to planning and to the development to be permitted, enforceable, precise and reasonable in all other respects.”
All that the Minister had to do to ensure that conditions were being properly applied was to give local authorities  a direction saying, “By the way, local authorities, when you are putting these conditions on things, can you please make sure that they follow the national planning policy framework?”
However, the Minister had other levers that he could use in addition to directing local authorities to abide by the NPPF. There is a section of planning practice guidance on the Government’s website explaining exactly how to apply conditions. There are six tests. Conditions must be necessary, relevant to planning and to the development to be permitted, enforceable, precise and reasonable in all other respects.
The web page goes on to tell local authorities how to apply the tests, in case they are not aware of that—although as they assess applications all the time I imagine they would be aware; but nevertheless I accept that it is helpful. The guidance that local authorities get about setting conditions that are necessary is:
“A condition must not be imposed unless there is a definite planning reason for it”.
So it must be
“needed to make the development acceptable in planning terms.
If a condition is wider in scope than is necessary to achieve the desired objective it will fail the test of necessity.”
The test of whether conditions are relevant to planning asks:
“Does the condition relate to planning objectives and is it within the scope of the permission to which it is to be attached?
A condition must not be used to control matters that are subject to specific control elsewhere in planning legislation (for example, advertisement control, listed building consents, or tree preservation).
Specific controls outside planning legislation may provide an alternative means of managing certain matters”.
The examples given are public highways and highways consent. The guidance is clear about what “relevant to planning” means, and that sometimes it might mean having to rely on something immediately outside the planning system.
On whether a condition is relevant to the development to be permitted, the guidance states:
“It is not sufficient that a condition is related to planning objectives: it must also be justified by the nature or impact of the development permitted.
A condition cannot be imposed in order to remedy a pre-existing problem or issue not created by the proposed development.”
That is, again, very helpful and precise.
The next test is whether it would be practicably possible to enforce the condition:
“Unenforceable conditions include those for which it would, in practice, be impossible to detect a contravention or remedy any breach of the condition, or those concerned with matters over which the applicant has no control.”
What is meant by “enforceable” is also thus pretty clear. As to the requirement to be precise:
“Poorly worded conditions are those that do not clearly state what is required and when must not be used.”
So local authorities are even given guidance on how to word a condition—never mind its content.
The condition must also be reasonable in all other respects, and the guidance refers to conditions
“which place unjustifiable and disproportionate burdens on an applicant”.
What a pity it is that the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton is not in his place, as he was talking about unreasonable burdens. He said that we could be placing burdens on developers. Actually, the Government’s own guidance states:
“Conditions which place unjustifiable and disproportionate burdens on an applicant will fail the test of reasonableness...Unreasonable conditions cannot be used to make development that is unacceptable in planning terms acceptable.”
There are lots and lots of pages of guidance about various circumstances in which conditions should and should not be used. There is the NPPF and the guidance, and there is further information from the Planning Advisory Service. If local authorities are in any doubt whatsoever about how they should be putting conditions together and the logic they should follow, and if they do not get everything they need from the guidance and the framework, the PAS document laying out the “Ten best practice principles” is very helpful. Principle 1 states:
“The number of conditions imposed through a planning permission should be kept to the minimum necessary to ensure good quality sustainable development.”
I ask the Minister to note that that actually mentions sustainable development.
The second principle is that applicants should provide “better detail” because that is likely to lead to fewer conditions.
Principle 3 states:
“Positive dialogue between applicant/planning authority/statutory consultees/community is likely to result in fewer conditions being imposed”.
The PAS document sets out a different way of achieving fewer conditions from the Government’s way of referring the matter to the Secretary of State. The Government’s own advisory service is suggesting that instead of taking the Government’s route, we take a route of dialogue, and try to use the dialogue between all the interested parties to come to an agreement about a condition or a lack of it.
Principle 4 states:
“If a matter is controlled under other regulatory regimes then it should not be the subject of a planning condition.”
Principle 5 states:
“A prescriptive condition setting out what would make the detail of a scheme acceptable is often a better option than an approval of detail condition.”
The document states that other considerations should include: whether the condition is deliverable; whether it is inappropriate in terms of timing or lack of clarity; whether phasing can increase risk and cost; and whether a planning obligation would be better than a condition. It also advises looking at notices, and thinking about whether conditions are enforceable or whether they can be done with some other notice, rather than a condition. It also states:
“If an approval of detail application involves consulting with the community/parish/neighbourhood planning forum, this should be flagged and explained in the reason for the condition.”
With all that information and guidance, it is extraordinary that the Government’s position seems to be, “We have set the framework, the guidance and detailed information for local authorities through the Planning Advisory Service. Yet you are still managing to come up with, on a fairly regular basis, a whole list of pre-commencement planning conditions that somehow manage to breach  these particular requirements.” It is quite extraordinary for the Government to say that. As we have said already today, if they are going to make that claim, it has to be backed up with evidence, and so far the Committee has simply not seen that evidence.

Gavin Barwell: We had some of this debate this morning when we considered the first group of amendments, while Mr Bone was in the Chair. Let me rehearse some of the arguments. There are four points that I want to make.
First, it is pretty undeniable that we have had a very partial presentation of the evidence we received, so I want to put on the record again what the evidence we received is. I acknowledge that it is mixed. Certainly, people came to us and said, “I don’t see a problem here,” but there were also plenty of people who said that there is a problem, so let me counterbalance what the hon. Lady said. The district councils network said that it supports the Government in seeking to address conditions. It was interesting that when I put it to Councillor Newman, who was speaking on behalf of the LGA, that that was the view of district councils, which make up the vast majority of local planning authorities, it seemed to be news to him.
I quoted a number of major developers earlier. Persimmon said in its annual report that,
“planning-related pre-start conditions continue to increase the time taken to bring new outlets”—
new homes—
“to market”.
Knight Frank stated that we
“need to address the increasingly onerous levels of pre-commencement conditions”.
The NHBC survey that I quoted provided clear evidence of small and medium-sized enterprises being concerned about, yes, the speed of discharge of planning conditions, but also the extent of those conditions.
I have not yet referred to some of the things said to us in the evidence sessions. For example, Mr Andrew Dixon, the head of policy at the Federation of Master Builders, told us that
“our members…consistently tell us that the number of planning conditions…has increased…significantly”.––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 6, Q1.]
From the Home Builders Federation, Mr Andrew Whitaker said that pre-commencement conditions had almost become “the default”. I suppose the Opposition will say, “We expect developers to say that”, but Mr Tim Smith, representing the Law Society, said:
“Do you really need to approve the details of your roof tiles before you start to demolish and clear the site?”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 58, Q107.]
We have had plenty of evidence, therefore, in both what was sent to us and what was said to us in the evidence sessions, to back up the fact that there is an issue, which has also been acknowledged, I gently point out to the hon. Member for City of Durham, by two of our own Committee members. The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood gives a different explanation for this, but she acknowledged that some planning  officers were imposing pre-commencement conditions simply because they did not have time to read the full papers submitted to them—that is a clear acknowledgement of a problem. The hon. Member for Bassetlaw is not in Committee today to defend himself, but I am sure that if, when he is, he feels that I have misrepresented him, he will point that out in very voluble terms. On Second Reading, he gave a personal example of his local authority applying an unnecessary pre-commencement condition. The evidence is there, therefore, that people are concerned about the issue.
On my second point, I should declare an interest. I have known Councillor Newman since I was knee-high to a grasshopper and have been arguing with him for a long time. He is a great one for metaphors; but said that the measure was
“a sledgehammer to crack a nut”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 23, Q31.]
First, I am not sure whether the measure is a sledgehammer and, secondly, the evidence would suggest that the issue is not a nut. I asked him, in fact, how large a nut it was, but he had no evidence that he wished to present on that front.
The quotes that the hon. Member for City of Durham has just given us from the LGA and London Councils, which I acknowledge, were basically saying that the provision is unnecessary—although I dispute that—but they were certainly not saying that it will be harmful. I think that they were accepting that Government planning guidance and the NPPF are in place, and that the correct tests are there, in terms of conditions, but they were saying that all those things are being met already, so there is no need to put them in legislation. They were certainly not saying, “It’s wrong.” They were arguing about whether it was necessary to put something in legislation.
I want to end on two final points. We have had a long debate on the clause, which I suspect will prove the most controversial of all those in the Bill. The hon. Member for City of Durham quoted from the NPPF, and seemed to be trying to suggest that the fact that the Government were proposing the clause was somehow evidence that they were moving away from what the NPPF says about conditions. Let me quote again paragraph 206:
“Planning conditions should only be imposed where they are necessary, relevant to planning and to the development to be permitted, enforceable, precise and reasonable in all other respects.”
That is the key paragraph on conditions. She also quoted a passage relating to planning obligations, but that is section 106.
The language of the NPPF therefore clearly acknowledges that, on occasion, the best way to address an otherwise unacceptable impact of a development is to impose a planning condition. I want to make it very clear in Committee that that remains the Government’s view, that there will still be plenty of occasions on which local authorities wish to impose conditions, and sometimes pre-commencement conditions, and that we have no argument with that at all. All that we are seeking to do is to ensure that what is in guidance now will be reflected in statute, so that we can make sure that we deal properly with the issue.
The hon. Lady sort of suggested, “You’ve been saying it’s okay, but now you are saying not to do too much of it.” However, Government do that all the time. If a local authority came to me and asked, “How shall we fund our local services?”, I would reply, “Use council tax to  fund your services”, but the Government would also say, “Don’t do too much of that, though; do not increase taxes by a wholly disproportionate amount, because that has a damaging impact on residents.” Government do that often; it is a question of striking the right balance.
I end on a slightly partisan note, because this is the main area of the Bill on which the Government and Opposition differ. I made the point on Second Reading—and I will reinforce it now—that there is developing consensus in the House that the country needs to raise its game when it comes to the number of homes built. The difficulty with the position taken by the official Opposition is that, on too many issues, they will the ends, but not the means.
There were three examples on Second Reading. The first was on dealing with the conditions that too often slow up the build-out of schemes. The second was on permitted development, which we are about to come to. Thirdly, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw objected to the duty to co-operate, which is critical to ensuring that if one authority cannot meet its housing need, those homes do not disappear, but are shared out among its neighbours. Those issues involve tough choices.
For me, the key moment in the debate was when I asked the hon. Member for City of Durham whether she accepted—regardless of whether she thought it was justified—that imposing a significant number of pre-commencement conditions on an applicant was bound to delay the point at which spades went into the ground. She did not answer that question. It is undeniable that imposing onerous conditions on an applicant will delay the process from the point of planning permission being granted.

Roberta Blackman-Woods: My hon. Friends the Members for Oldham West and Royton and for Dulwich and West Norwood have done an effective demolition job on the Government’s case for promoting permitted development. The Opposition are on record, on a number of occasions, as being totally against the relaxation of permitted development rights for all the reasons that my hon. Friends outlined, including the very poor-quality development that often ensues from developers taking a permitted development route.
It is not that we are against a change of use from offices or agricultural buildings to residential; we just think that it is critical that local people have a say on whether those changes of use take place. The process should take place through the planning system, not through permitted development. We are living with some of the huge consequences, such as poorly planned developments and neighbourhoods, emerging from too much permitted development.
On amendment 28, we are not in favour or permitted development, but if the Government are in favour of it, it makes some sense that they might actually want to know what is going on with it. To date, they are probably not that aware. The compilation of the planning register would elicit further information from local authorities about what is happening with regard to permitted development. The circumstances set out in clause 8 are too restrictive and will not capture some of the information that local authorities have told all members of the Committee is very important to them.
How many additional homes have been created through permitted development? What is the impact on any local council regeneration plans, and on the local plan? Those questions are important. Let us begin with the local plan. If a lot of windfall sites have emerged through permitted development, and a lot of homes—even of relatively poor quality—have been created that contribute towards meeting the housing need, there might be an impact on local plan provisions. The local authority might like an opportunity to tell the Minister and everyone else about the impact of permitted development on the local plan. It will also want to be able to give information not only on the type of housing delivered but on the number of homes, who they are for, whether they are affordable, their quality and a whole lot of other issues.
My most significant point about the amendment is what it would mean for regeneration, and I am really interested to hear what the Minister says about that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton touched on earlier, a number of cities and towns have areas with empty shops, pubs or offices, but they are empty for a reason: the local authority has or is developing a plan to regenerate the area. Local authorities have told us that a developer will now be able to come along, get the office block and say, “I can make a quick buck here by converting this block into housing through the prior approval route”—and bang goes the council’s ability to regenerate the whole area in line with a local plan that has emerged through the neighbourhood planning system or consultations with the community. That does not seem a very sensible way forward.
If I were the Minister, I would want to know whether a policy of mine was actually impeding local authorities from regenerating their areas because permitted development was getting in the way. I would want to do something to put that right and to help the local authority with that process. The Minister will know that the prior approval system in place for permitted development simply does not give a local authority the tools to turn down a permitted development, either for regeneration reasons or because it severely, or even mildly, affects the authority’s local plan.
Indeed, the prior approval system is very complicated. The Government make much of the fact that they have simplified the planning system; I could not help but smile when I saw the statutory instrument that they passed last year, the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, which is 162 pages long—such have been their extensions to permitted development. Each class of permitted development has different prior approval conditions, but none of them allows consideration of the issues  addressed by our amendment. For instance, for a change from offices to dwelling houses, the local planning authority has to consider
“whether the prior approval of the authority will be required as to…transport and highways impacts…contamination risks…and…flooding risks”,
but it cannot take account of anything else. If the development will impede a regeneration scheme, the authority cannot even consider that. If there are huge energy conservation issues because the office block has poor energy efficiency, the authority cannot do anything about that either. If it thinks the materials are wrong, it cannot do anything about that. If it absolutely needs affordable housing in the area, it cannot do anything about that. There is really a very small list of things that it can do anything about, and that list certainly does not cover the issues in the amendment.
So what about the change of storage or distribution centres to dwelling houses? Given where storage or distribution centres are likely to be based—they could be on an industrial estate or at the edge of it, or on the edge of town—one would think there might a slightly longer list, because of the need to protect future residents and occupants. A few more prior approval criteria are listed, which is good. Air quality is included, because the development could be located within a business area; that is good to see. The list also includes transport and highways, contamination risks, flooding risks, noise impact and cases in which the authority thinks that the mix is not appropriate. That list is good but does not include any of the issues we have raised in the amendment.
We then have changes from agricultural buildings to dwelling houses. That is interesting, because in that case we have a slightly longer list that includes transport and highways, noise impact, contamination risks, flooding risks, whether the location or siting of the building makes it otherwise impractical or undesirable for the building to change from agricultural use to a class C use, and the “design or external appearance” of the building. It is interesting we have that for an agricultural building but not for any of the other categories of change of use. One can only ponder why the Government think external appearance is important if the development is in a rural area, but in an urban or suburban area the appearance of what materialises at the end of the permitted development process is of no interest at all.
I hope the Minister will be able to enlighten us as to why such a limited set of circumstances can be taken into account by local authorities when deciding whether to grant permission or whether an application needs to go through a prior approval process. I for one would like the Minister to look at that. We know—we will talk about this in a moment—that the quality of what is delivered through permitted development is often very poor indeed. A lot of properties quickly end up not being fit for purpose, and there are huge conflicts of interest. The Minister will know that, because his predecessor had to look at a lot of complaints from residents who perhaps unknowingly had a music venue next door to them that had a licence to 2 am, 3 am or 4 am. Once the office was converted into residential accommodation, residents wanted the music venue to be closed down. Understandably, the people who used the music venue said, “Excuse me, we were here first.”  The music venue might have been going for 30, 40 or 50 years. Should those people be denied their music venue simply because the Minister’s scheme for prior approval did not think about noise?
The list we have given in the amendment is not a comprehensive or exhaustive one. I am sure we could add lots of other things to the information that local authorities might be required to give that would help the permitted development system work better. I hope the Minister will be grateful for that, but he might not want that information added to what is, again, a new burden. He will say, “Ah, the hon. Lady is being inconsistent again because she is adding to the considerable additional burden by asking local authorities to give information in a whole variety of circumstances that are not on the Government’s list.” However, I have a way of dealing with that—amendment 29.
Amendment 29 accepts that, with the register, the clause is putting additional burdens on local authorities, but it also recognises that there is a whole lot of other information that the Minister should gather if his Department really wants to understand what is going on. Amendment 29 therefore says that if the Minister thinks that local authorities should compile the register, then he ought to pay for it and not—once again—put an additional financial burden on to local authorities.
This morning, I was worried that the Minister was back-tracking a bit on his understanding of the huge resource problems being experienced by local authorities, so I thought that I would bolster the case that the Opposition are making about what a huge issue the lack of resourcing of local planning departments is and refer to the National Audit Office report produced at the end of 2014. For planning departments, it makes sobering reading, because 46% of their budget was cut between 2010 and 2014. Just when the Government are asking local authorities to step up to the mark, to get more planning permissions, to do more and to get the planning system moving, the budgets are being cut by half.
From the report, it is clear that the largest spending reductions in councils have been in planning and development services, in both single-tier and county councils. The average reduction, as I said, is 46%. That is a huge amount of money for planning departments, and extremely difficult for them to make up, whether in the short or the long term.

Gavin Barwell: I would not accept that a council is a community, but I certainly accept that it comprises the elected representatives of that community and speaks with the authority of the community, if that is helpful to the hon. Gentleman.
Stepping aside from the controversial topic of office-to-residential conversion, the question that we should ask ourselves when deciding whether something should be a permitted development right or require a full planning application is whether the change being made to a property is sufficiently significant that it is likely to have implications for adjoining owners. If it does have implications, there are clearly arguments that it should go through the planning application process. I was trying to make the point that the Government did not invent permitted development—it has existed for a period of time—but have chosen to extend it to particular classes of conversion.
The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, who represents a constituency not too far from mine, spoke passionately, as she did on Second Reading, of her concerns about the permitted development process. It is entirely legitimate to say that, compared with the full planning application, the authority does not receive a section 106 contribution for local infrastructure or for affordable housing, and neither do the space standard rules apply. She raises legitimate concerns.
Weighed against that, we must look at the contribution of the policy to housing supply. I believe that in Croydon—my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, also sits on this Committee—the policy has certainly brought back into use buildings that would otherwise not have come back into use. Therefore, it has contributed to supply. The debate on space standards is particularly interesting. We certainly need to ensure that at least a proportion of our housing stock is sufficiently large, providing the space to accommodate families with particular needs. There is a much more difficult balance to strike on  whether we should say that all homes must meet a minimum standard, or whether we should allow flexibility. Strong arguments can be made both ways.
I visited a site just south of Nottingham at the end of last week, where I saw a good mixed tenure development with some owner-occupied housing. The housing association also provided some shared ownership properties and some affordable rent. When the Homes and Communities Agency master-planned that site before selling it on to the developer, it insisted that all the homes built on it meet the national space standard. Perhaps predictably, the developer argued to me that it would have preferred to have that requirement only for some properties, because it would have been able to build more homes, which is clearly in its commercial interests.
Interestingly, the housing association made the same argument. It needed some stock with sufficient space to accommodate families who perhaps needed a carer, or included somebody in a wheelchair. However, the association believed that housing need in the area was sufficiently acute that it would rather have had a compromise whereby some of the homes had that space standard but it could got a larger number of homes overall out of the site. I am not expressing a view one way or the other; I am simply saying that there is a choice to be made between overall supply and space standards.

Jim McMahon: I thank the Minister for that response. Like him, I am a geek when it comes to data. I love nothing more than spending time in the library on the Office for National Statistics website—that counts as entertainment for me. However, I am also aware that data can often be used as a crutch for a weak argument. Data have been thrown out in bucket loads, but the substance of this argument has not been deployed in quite the same way. We talked a lot about numbers, which is great. We have not talked anywhere near enough about affordability, quality or even if these units are occupied. We know that in many towns and cities foreign investors are coming in and buying up units that local people could live in, ensuring that no one lives there.
When we talk about data collection and how councils have enough to do—that is a fair point—we must also accept that development control teams will be in those buildings, making sure they comply with development control rules. They will be signing those buildings off for occupation. At that point the buildings will come on to the council tax register, and any council worth its salt will then make applications for the new homes bonus. So councils are reporting units anyway, but via a different route. One thing that councils would appreciate is a single point of reporting. Rather than all these Government Departments coming to councils from all over the place asking for individual pieces of data, the Government should say with one voice, “This is what we need to know.” Collating the data in one place would helpfully save time and energy.
There is quite a lot of agreement on the principles we have been talking about. The combination being mooted here is of quite small living spaces with a lot of communal areas. A development is being built today in Oldham on that model, where the flats are quite small but there is a gym facility, communal areas and quality space that will attract a niche market of commuters who no doubt work or study in Manchester city centre. There is a place for that, but that is where the local authority has made a conscious decision that that would add value to  the overall mix of accommodation within the town. It is not a free-for-all. Unfortunately, the permitted development route at the moment is a free-for-all for far too many people, without the right checks and balances in place.
I suspect that we will not be able to come much closer than agreeing that permitted development seems to have worked quite well in one or two locations. The evidence, in particular when we hear representations from local government, says that it is fraught with difficulties and removes the local control we know is very important. Perhaps we cannot get any closer than that. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.